So I'm not one to jump on the bandwagon a lot of people have when it comes to games journalists, but I do have to single out the IGN review of this game for a minute here. In the review, they point out how new companion Bode starts off generically but eventually gets fleshed out more and becomes more interesting and that is hilarious to me. Truly, I cannot imagine a deeper and more nuanced character arc than going from "I am generic dad character who will do anything to protect my daughter" to "I am generic dad character who will do anything to protect my daughter, but now I have a red lightsaber." What a bland, nonsensical heel turn that sent this game's story hurtling off of a cliff.

That being said, this game lets you use your blaster to parry enemies and essentially play Bloodborne in space, so it's impossible for me to hate it.

After well over 150 hours I am finally free from the prison of Xenoblade 3. I don't mean "prison" as an insult in this context, just that this game is inherently time-consuming and there are other things I've wanted to do. As I mentioned in my review of the epilogue they added to Xenoblade 1, despite my misgivings towards anime tropes, I consider myself a Xenoblade fan. Xenoblade 3 has only deepened that appreciation. Half the reason I spent so much time in this game is because I was so desperate to everything I could in the game before the end (and I still ended up missing some)

Xenoblade 3 was promoted as a narrative that would bring together the worlds of Xenoblade 1 and 2. As you might imagine, talking about this game also means spoiling everything from those two games. Quite frankly, I'm a bit disappointed that they promoted this game in that way. For one thing, the narrative is mostly self-contained and not really driven by the events of Xenoblade 1 and 2 significantly enough to warrant giving that information away from the start. For another, one of Xenoblade 2's best twists is revealing that it's even in continuity with the first game at all. Admittedly, 5 years is more than enough time to have played it, but that information likely came as a surprise to many.

So then, how does Xenoblade Chronicles 3 bring together the worlds of the first two games? Well, in my understanding, the Xenoblade series itself can be divided into three core pillars: Combat, World, and Story. I feel like if we got a peek at the design documents of Monolith Soft, they'd say the same thing. The best compliment I can give to Xenoblade 3 is that it succeeds at all three of these pillars on its own terms, let alone the things it integrates from the previous games.



I want to first talk about the combat, as it's the main thing that appeals to me about this series. This is the element most closely tied into Xenoblade 1 and 2, because obviously each game's combat is an evolution of what came before. However, as we'll get into, the depth presented by 3's approach to combat manages to combine the best of both games' combat into something more than the sum of its parts.

I started my journey with this series the way I imagine at least half of its fans did: because Shulk showed up in Smash Bros and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Xenoblade 1's combat immediately stuck out to me as interesting. I'm not much of a turn-based combat person, I find the pace to be slow and dull. Call me a normie, but I'm more into action games.

Xenoblade feels like an attempt to strike an exact middle ground between the appeal of turn-based and real-time combat. In terms of the overall pace of combat, there's no downtime, the only time the game halts is for chain attacks. But the actual rhythm and flow of combat feels a lot more relaxed than an action game. You're still selecting abilities from a menu, there's an emphasis on creating synergy between your own abilities and your party's to set up devastating effects. I get why people found this off-putting, the combat is incredibly complex, but once you meet it where it's at, combat is an oddly calming experience.

The main difference between the combat of Xenoblade 1 and Xenoblade 2 is how charging arts works. In Xenoblade 1, when you use an art, you'll have to wait for that art to recharge. In Xenoblade 2, you charge arts by auto-attacking. This subtle change has its own advantages and disadvantages. Xenoblade 1 has more consequences for using an Art, as there's nothing that can be done to speed up a cooldown, but it actually feels a lot more free as the downtime gives you more time to react to what your party or the enemy is doing and plan accordingly. Xenoblade 2 feels much more involved by comparison, because repositioning means you can't attack and recharge arts, yet many arts are more effective depending on where you're positioned.

Neither of these methods are inherently superior to one another, though I prefer 2's as it adds much more depth, but it did raise the question of what a third game would do. And the answer is... both. All of the game's characters can be divided into two factions: Keves and Agnus. Keves represents Xenoblade 1, and Agnus represents Xenoblade 2. This has narrative consequences as we'll get into later, but for now let's focus on the gameplay. Keves characters recharge arts like in Xenoblade 1, simply by waiting for a cooldown. Though, the UI is now changed to mostly match Xenoblade 2's, with only 3 main arts your character can have equipped along with an unchangeable Talent Art. Agnus characters recharge arts like Xenoblade 2, requiring auto-attacks to fill up the gauge.

At first this change seemed kind of pointless and arbitrary to me. Why wouldn't I always want to use an Agnus character since I prefer Xenoblade 2's style of combat? Well, maybe 30 minutes after I asked that question, the game answered with my favorite mechanic ever to be introduced to this entire series: Fusion Arts.

One flaw of Xenoblade 2 was only having access to 3 arts at a time, not counting your Talent Art. This technically went up to 9 by switching Blades, but switching Blades couldn't be done willy-nilly and it required much less mental effort to focus on using one Blade and only bring out the others when absolutely necessary. So, in terms of the moment to moment gameplay, it still mostly felt like you only had three arts.

Xenoblade 3 doesn't have blades, but it does have classes. You see, Keves and Agnus arts aren't bound to their characters, but rather, their classes. A Kevesi class uses the Xenoblade 1 art charge system, and an Agnian class uses the system from Xenoblade 2. You can level up not just your character, but their current class as well. Levelling up a class enough will allow you to "master" certain arts of that class. Switching over to a class from the other faction will allow you to use those mastered arts on that class. So, for example, if I master a few arts from a Kevesi class, like Noah's Swordfighter class, and then switch over to an Agnian class like Mio's Zephyr, I'll be able to use any Swordfighter arts I mastered while still playing as a Zephyr. This essentially means that every character, with enough effort put into diversifying their classes, will have both Kevesi and Agnian arts available to them.

This already seems cool, but as soon as the game introduces this mechanic, it takes it a step further with Fusion Arts. Every Master Art slot is paired with a regular art slot. If both of these arts are currently charged, you can hold ZR to use both arts at the same time. This will trigger the regular art, along with its animation and additional effects, but also inherit the damage and secondary effects of the Master Art. One of my favorite examples is available almost immediately, by pairing the Zephyr's Wide Slash art with any high-damage art on an Attacker class. Wide Slash evades enemy attacks while active, making the player completely invulnerable while it's triggered. So you can essentially use any high-damage art you have and be completely invincible during the animation. So, if you time it right, while an enemy is charging up a powerful art, you'll be completely unaffected and put less stress on your healers.

I could gush on for hours about this new system and how much I love it and how much it immediately blows Xenoblade 1 and 2's already fantastic combat systems completely out of the water, but I do want to talk about a few drawbacks. Characters level up and unlock classes by fighting enemies, as you'd expect. But something the game doesn't tell you, especially in the case of unlocking classes, is that this will only happen when fighting enemies within a certain level range of your character's own level.

This is fine, in theory, except you'll likely be doing a lot of exploring and other side content in order to unlock every class you can, so you'll probably become overlevelled without even trying to. This means you'll have a bunch of classes unlocked, but not be gaining the class XP needed to actually make them usable. I actually spent several hours of this game wracking my brain as to why my classes weren't levelling up anymore because the game flat out didn't explain any of this to me.

What's weird is, this could be fixed using the game's own systems. Much like Xenoblade 2 and even the remaster of Xenoblade 1 for the Switch, you can de-level your characters at certain rest points, and it'll even save the amount of XP needed to level back up in the bank so if you decide you want to go back up to your original level, that option is available to you. In Xenoblade 3, this option is only available after beating the game, rendering it basically only useful in New Game+, but the Xenoblade 1 remaster already had a solution to this: make it available from the start. It was locked behind an optional "expert mode" that could be turned on or off at will. This allowed you to basically strategically de-level to make sure your party always matched the level of the challenge presented to you.

Why this wasn't available in Xenoblade 3, a game where if you're more than 4 levels above your opponent (except for a few quest-specific enemies) you won't gain any class XP, absolutely confounds me. Yes, theoretically you could just use the system to de-level your character and grind the same boss over and over again to store up enough regular XP to catapult your character up to level 99, but since they already proved they could trust the player with this power in the Xenoblade 1 remaster, it honestly confounds me that they didn't extend the same olive branch to Xenoblade 3. It'd allow you to engage with the robust class system as you play the game, instead of like me, who is now having to handle most of that in the postgame.



The next pillar of design for the Xenoblade series is the most iconic: the world. The world represents the most severe departure from the first two games, as rather than taking place on the body of massive titans, you're instead on a singular, cohesive landmass. But along the way (or if you saw the box art) you'll likely notice some things are a bit... familiar.

This game's world is the most literal collision of Xenoblade 1 and 2, as many landmarks from the two games have simply been plopped into the world of XC3 in an almost haphazard fashion. The sword of the Mechonis is now awkwardly jutting out of the shore of Eryth Sea, the great Titan of Uraya now sits alongside the ruins of Morytha. In almost any other game, I'd consider this lazy and senseless, but in this game, the senseless mashing together of landmarks is... kind of the point?

Allow me to relay one of my favorite experiences from early into my playthrough of this game. As you wander through the deserts of the Fornis Region, you'll mostly be encountering very natural terrain. Like the rest of the world, it feels very untouched by humans. That is until you notice massive mechanical structures poking out of the ground in a valley off to the side of the main path. Naturally, you become curious as to what they are. As you wander closer, you notice the odd curvature of them. They're... fingers? And the thought hits your mind right as you notice the familiar mechanical pattern etched into them: Inexplicably, in the midst of this desert, is my favorite location in all of Xenoblade 1, the Fallen Arm.

But the hand of the Mechonis is no longer surrounded by an ocean and overgrown with lush beauty, representative of that area's narrative function of proving the worlds of Bionis and Mechonis can co-exist. Now it's buried in the sand, its purpose and very presence forgotten. One of the most memorable things about the Fallen Arm was being able to climb up one of its fingers and reach the tip where a tough enemy was waiting for you. It was also one of the best views in the entire game, offering a stunning view of the Bionis, Mechonis, and even the rest of the Fallen Arm below you. If you try to do the same thing here, all you'll find is a view of a bland desert, obscured by duststorms.

I'll circle back around to this point in more detail when we discuss the narrative, but this moment is a microcosm of the point of Xenoblade 3's world as a whole. It's identifiably a bizarre mish-mash of locations from the first two games, but rather than be asked to look upon them in awe and reverence, you're left disgusted at the state they've been left in. The Fallen Arm no longer hosts any life at all. Nor does the Urayan Titan, now ravaged by bizarre, existential explosions. Alcamoth's brilliance has been replaced with an ugly, mechanical coat of paint by the new lords of this world who have taken it hostage.

One other advantage of setting this game in a singular landmass is the openness it provides. Now, don't get me wrong, this isn't an open world game by any definition, but given that this is the first Xenoblade game whose development started after Xenoblade Chronicles X (a game I'd probably try giving a second shot if they ever gave it the Switch release it deserves) so it's likely that its design had a huge influence here. I found myself veering off into side areas and actively discovering things far more than in XC3's linear predecessors. There's so much the game is happy to let you simply not know about. To go without seeing.

This is likely another reason why I felt, more strongly than previous games, the incentive to do as much side content as I possibly could. There's so much to discover, several sections and bosses you likely would never have realized even existed unless you specifically veered way off course. The story, for the most part, takes you on the most linear, straightforward path through this world that it can, but to do so would mean you miss out on so much of the explorable space the game provides. I had multiple times where the main story essentially went on hold for several days because I got so caught up in filling out the world map. Monolith Soft, once again, have not missed when it comes to world design.



The final pillar I want to discuss is the story. And, unsurprisingly for my experiences with the Xenoblade series, my feelings are complicated but mostly positive. As much as this game is a literal collision of Xenoblade 1 and 2's stories, it's also a collision of their themes.

Xenoblade 1's story, if you played long enough to get to this point, presented the story of an eternal god who had manipulated the world into an endless cycle of war, death, of rebirth to keep himself living eternally. Xenoblade 2 was a bit more blatantly existential, but not in a way that's as cool as it sounds, more like in an armchair philosophy way. Its main antagonists waffle on endlessly about whether or not human nature is ultimately good and if the world is worth saving. I poke fun, but I also enjoy the story of 2.

Xenoblade 3 is sort of a mixture of both of these themes, but in a way that's far more blatant about what it's trying to say than either of those games are. There's a moment early on where a character tells our main heroes "the face of your real enemy is-" before being attacked and cut off, never finishing the sentence. The answer is meant to be, in a literal sense, Moebius, the main antagonists of the game. In retrospect, however, the answer might as well be "the status quo" or even something as specific as "capitalism." This game is even more blatant about somethings the previous two games already advocated against: Stagnation. How the preservation of our unjust status quo only serves to continue the persecution of those under its foot.

Right from the opening narration, you're presented a world you immediately want to change. Not because it exists in some post-apocalyptic state, not because there's some past version of the world you want it to go back to, but simply because the world as it exists is bad. You're told the basics: Two nations are at war. Keves and Agnus have been fighting longer than any can ever remember. Each nation wields Flame Clocks, which provide life to their soldiers, but are fueled by the lives of their enemies. So the two nations fight, killing the other to preserve themselves. Not long after this, you're told how the world is almost entirely populated by these soldiers, who are born from pods at an age around their early teens, and then given a fixed lifespan of a mere ten years from that point, though most die in battle well before then.

All of these things are the first pieces of information you're given about this world. And it's only presented objectively. Noah, a Kevesi soldier and our protagonist, doesn't tell you his opinion on these things. To him, that's just the way things have always been. But to the player, not raised in this society, you're immediately meant to question how the world got to be this way and why it's being allowed to continue. Questions Noah himself will be asking not long after. These questions don't just echo throughout the game's story, they ARE the game's story. The first conclusion the story wants you to draw, before it's revealed any antagonists or even a plot, is that the way the world is structured is morally wrong and must be changed.

Noah holds a somewhat special position in his nation, as he's an off-seer. After every bloody battle with Agnus, it's his duty to play a special melody on his flute that will "see off" the dead Kevesi soldiers. This process turns the dead husk into motes of light that rise up into the air and are supposedly returned to the nation's Queen, although we later find out this is essentially part of a recycling process so they can use their birthing pods to create more soldiers. But, unusually, Noah also likes to perform this process on even the fallen Agnian soldiers. There's nothing saying he's not allowed to, but most of his fellow soldiers don't really think he should. To them, Agnus is nothing but their mortal enemies. This is important, as it establishes that although Noah has yet to fundamentally question the structure of his society, he does possess more empathy for his enemy than most.

As you might expect given this setup, Noah's world is radically turned around once he's given a chance to stop fighting Agnians and actually talk to them. One of the few people who exists outside of Keves and Agnus grants Noah, two of his friends, and a trio of Agnian soldiers the mysterious power of Ouroboros, which is barely explained in the moment. The gist is, these 6 are now stuck with these powers and tasked with setting the world to rights. But being given that task means nothing to them, not inherently. They don't see a problem with the world as it is because that world is all they've ever known.

The mysterious man, named Vandham, tries to unite these two groups but is cut off by an attack by a member of Moebius, the main antagonists of the game, who are all (with the exception of two of them) way too campy for this relatively somber and reflective story. But the point is, this attack ends up accidentally triggering one of the new Ouroboros powers: Interlinking. Specific pairs of our six-person group of Ouroboros are able to fuse together into a weird biomechanical form. In this case, it's Noah, and the leader of the Agnian trio and fellow off-seer, Mio.

When this fusion first occurs, the two get a glimpse into the other's memories. Most notably, how similar they are. Both born of this war, both off-seers, both people who have lost friends at far too young of an age. The more they see, the more they realize their stories are the same. And it's here that they first gain the understanding of what Vandham was trying to tell them, about an enemy bigger than Keves and Agnus, because it's the first moment they've actually been given a chance to look past that arbitrary divide.

In the Interlinked form, they quickly dispatch the invading Moebius. But they're too late to save Vandham. While I'm not going to argue the death of this minor character with like ten lines total is sad, I do think how this death is handled ends up being the emotional core of the game. But to explain that, I'm going to need to back up a bit.

Keves and Agnus both have off-seers, performing the same duties for their fallen soldiers. But each nation has their own signature off-seeing tune. Noah, again being mildly more empathetic to his enemy than most, has actually memorized the Agnian off-seeing tune. It's actually how he manages to fight on equal footing with Mio, by realizing she's synchronized her swift movements to the Agnian off-seeing tune she's already had to play a thousand times before. We later learn that the off-seeing process is less about the tune being played, hence why Noah is able to send off even Agnian soldiers with the Kevesi tune, and more about the feeling imbued into the melody. Noah's ability to send off the enemy is inherently tied to that empathy.

And the point of all of this recap of the first chapter of this game was to lead to this moment, maybe one of the most singularly effective moments in the entire Xenoblade series. Realizing that Vandham, this man they knew for mere minutes who yet managed to fundamentally alter their entire worldview, deserves to be sent off the same as anyone else, Noah and Mio both put aside their fighting, and, without words, pull out their flutes and send him off. They each play their respective nations' melody, and in doing so you're treated to a beautiful harmony. One of my biggest frustrations with the Xenoblade series is its tendency to waffle on far more than is needed, so fittingly, its most powerful moment is completely wordless.

This entire first chapter exists to make sure you understand why these two people would ever play these melodies together, and why it's so meaningful that they do. How these simple flute melodies represent entire societal barriers being completely torn down to create something more powerful and more beautiful than either of these nations could hope to achieve on their own. Right away, these two characters who have known each other for ten minutes tops and haven't even exchanged names yet have formed a powerful, unbreakable bond. They've completely sold you on this connection between two strangers, and as the story goes on, certain aspects of the narrative really only work because the game managed to achieve this.

This moment basically is the game's story on a more personal scale. The fact that these are only two of the six main characters, and that it doesn't even rely on the other four, is kind of where my problems arise. The game does not put nearly as much effort into developing the similar connections it seemingly wants to set up with the others. And it leaves the remaining cast, while enjoyable in their own right, feeling a lot more hollow and obligatory than Noah and Mio.

There's little else I can discuss about the game's story from here. I've basically explained it all from here. The first chapter is so effective in how it sets up the world and character dynamics that every single twist from there becomes almost too predictable. I know this is a spoiler review, but just in case, I'm warning you now that I'm going to spoil nearly every twist in the game just to prove a point.

In Chapter 3, when Eunie discovers her own name tag on a husk that looks suspiciously like her? Oh, I guess when soldiers are recycled back into those pods to make new ones, they actually just remake the same people over and over again. Sure hope that won't take 20 more hours to reveal. That masked guy with black hair working for Moebius? Probably another version of Noah. And they mention a Moebius named M (they all have this stupid gimmick where their names are a single letter) so that's probably another version of Mio. Why are Moebius perpetuating this war? Well, their name is literally Moebius, so it's likely they somehow gain their power and livelihoods from preserving this endless status quo.

I'm not saying any of this to be mean to the game. I'd rather these twists be predictable but resonate thematically than constantly aim for shock and surprise. Ideally they'd be both, but who knows, maybe every single one of those twists I mentioned surprised someone else. But it just goes to show that the introductory chapter, although the weakest in terms of gameplay, ends up being the strongest and most important part of the story. Everything afterwards essentially just coasts on what was already telegraphed.

What's crazy about this game's story is that everything I just discussed is so separate from Xenoblade 1 and 2 that an outsider to the series might look at everything I just wrote and wonder how those games even factor in. But as I alluded to in the world section, I think that disconnect is kind of the point. I think the fact that these recycled elements are here but matter so little is intrinsically tied to the narrative.

The big exposition dump that begins the final chapter reveals what's really going on with this game's world. Long ago, the universe was split in two. This was the experiment that became the catalyst for the stories of Xenoblade 1 and 2, this much we knew. But apparently, long after either of those games, the universe inherently tried to come back together. And when these worlds collided, they would destroy each other in the process. But, Melia from Xenoblade 1 and Nia from Xenoblade 2 learned how to communicate across universes and devised a plan for what to do about this existential disaster.

They couldn't stop the collision, that much was certain. It was inevitable. All that was left was to ensure something new would come after. So they devised Origin, a computer that would store the memory of the entirety of both universes and then build a new universe from the ashes with that memory. They each built their half in their respective universe, leaving them with nothing to do but wait for the impending day.

But in the moment Origin was meant to activate, something interfered. An inherent desire of humanity to stop the wheel of time from turning, to reject the world's end and the beginning of a new one, took control of the system. This desire took the form of the first Moebius. Instead of rebuilding the world properly, time was essentially frozen at the moment of collision. What remained was a bizarre, nonsensical amalgamation of pieces of the two universes. The world would stay this way as long as Moebius controlled Origin. So, they set about using Origin's systems to maintain the world in this frozen state, and more importantly, to keep Moebius alive as its rulers.

Their main idea was to feed on the life force of the inhabitants of the universe. It's implied that they may have created these new inhabitants using data from Origin, as the opening prologue shows a young Noah during a time when Alcamoth was still standing in its original form. Regardless, the best way to feed on the life force of these people was to pit them against each other, hence the founding of the nations of Keves and Agnus. Get them to kill each other, feed their essence to the Flame Clock, Moebius stays alive. And this horrid, stagnant state persisted on. Time was not literally frozen, but nothing changed.

The war raged on for an unfathomably long time. We're never given an exact date, at one point it's mentioned the war's lasted a thousand years but later on a flashback to 1000 years ago implies the war has gone on way longer than that. So long that all of these remnants of the old worlds, and their original significance, were lost to the ages. No one knows of the Mechonis, just that a sword juts out of the land. No one knows that Uraya was once a living titan, now it's just some suspiciously whale-shaped mountains.

This is the point I was trying to make. The haphazard nature of these recognizable elements is kind of the point. They're the result of Moebius eternally trying to preserve what was, rather than letting the proper flow of the universe resume. Instead of letting the new beginning occur, they keep the world stagnant in this state, even long after any meaning those old worlds had was lost. In an age where nostalgia is used for nothing but reverence, things to make you point at the screen and go "I RECOGNIZE THAT!" I have respect for media that actually turns that mindset against us. This isn't the first to do it, nor is it entirely free from a few moments of that very problem itself (most notably with some cutscenes at the very end) but the Fallen Arm being buried and forgotten in the sand without fanfare is more powerful than seeing it faithfully recreated in all its glory ever could be.

The only thing that's left to talk about from here is that despite all the praise I gave to the themes of this game, it's a little bit undermined by the ending. The fundamental premise of the game is that the universe simply cannot exist separately, it will always try to come back together. Origin's purpose was to build something else from that collision. Not this hodge-podge we see in the actual game, but something cohesive and genuinely new. So why is it, at the end of the game, when Moebius is defeated and the characters renounce their worldview and vow to create a world where everyone has the freedom to choose their own path to the future, that the universe separates again?

This works on a character level, as a sort of tragic ending. For all the work put into Noah and Mio's connection, in the end they're forced not to submit to the worldview of Noah's evil incel doppelganger and accept that they can't be together forever. But on a broader thematic level, separating these two worlds doesn't feel like time moving forward again, it feels like it's moving backwards. This is a game that very explicitly goes against idealizing the past and preserving the present, and instead moving towards an uncertain future. So I'm lost as to why the universes separate again. Especially since the main characters all vow to find each other again. Would that not be repeating the same point they already drilled into our heads a thousand times?

My best guess is that this is meant to set up a possible Xenoblade Chronicles 4, but honestly, the existence of a proper Xenoblade 4 sounds kinda... bad to me? This entire game's story is about accepting that things end and learning to move forward. It's supposed to be a finale to this era of Xenoblade so why trip over itself at the last second to set up something else? I don't want to focus on this point much more though, because it's ultimately speculation. For all we know, Xenoblade 4 will be completely disconnected from previous entries. But regardless of why this ending is the way that it is, I'm still frustrated at the result.



Xenoblade Chronicles 3, overall, is a triumph. It somehow manages to be the best Xenoblade game despite deliberately living in the shadow of its predecessors. This series started out as not having a chance of ever even making it outside of Japan to becoming one of Nintendo's biggest JRPG franchises. And yet despite this, just like its own story would advocate, the series never feels complacent with where it's at. It's as messy and imperfect as ever, and yet still feels as though it's always striving to evolve. That it can warrant such undying devotion from me, someone who hates JRPGs, is a testament to just how good this series manages to be.